UMECUnited Mining Exploration Commission: A group of friends playing JumpGate-- "a MMORPG that launched smoothly, breaks from fantasy character setting, emphasizes PvP, and is the first persistent world space simulator that nobody talks about." ~Scorch

As there are a lot of new players in JG, I thought I’ll write down what every JumpGate Rookie should know. Of course you can find all of this in several scattered sources, but here you’ll find all the super-important stuff together.

1. The controls:
So you’ve survived the registration with the help of Jagus‘ guide (http://forum.mightygames.com/showth...=&threadid=1016 ) and haven’t gone bonkers yet? Very good. The first thing you should do is to customize your controls.

To do that click on the sweet small triangle in the upper left corner on your screen after you’ve started JG (or just press ESC) and choose „controls“. On the top of the screen should be a keyboard symbol. Click the arrow next to it to switch to keyboard and mouse or keyboard and joystick. Playing with just keyboard is no fun at all.

No matter if you’ve chosen mouse or joystick, set „deadzone“ in the properties menu to 0. This keeps your mouse or joystick from having too much leeway, which is enormous helpful for targeting. And even the most peaceful pilot needs to hit a Jumpgate from time to time.

Important:
Ingame you have five chat channels. F1 is the channel for you faction members in the sector, F2 with your squad (everywhere), F3 sector chat (no matter what faction), F4 is for whispering ( :name to choose a pilot) and F5 is a general chat channel (:help when you start). There should also be people who can help you, though I’ve heard different stories.

2. Docking
You’ll need docking maneuvers through your complete JumpGate career – without it, you won’t arrive anywhere. For the real n00b this is the hardest maneuver there is, for the veteran as unusual as breathing.

The only docking help in JG are the green dockingrings. Switch through your targets (if you don’t know how to, go back to chapter 1, controls) until you target the station. If your distance to the station is 6000 or less, you can see the green docking rings, which mark the flightpath to the docking tube. During your first maneuvers you can fly slowly into the green zone, brake down to 0, turn towards the docking tube and fly into it with max velocity 100. When you’re in the tube, you need to be below 100v, or you’ll just leave scorchmarks on the tube.

It’s very easy to dock with the first ships you’ll fly, as they are light and their engines are powerful in relation to their mass. Later it’s not always sensible to break with your braking thrusters. Instead, turn your ship 180° and give thrust until you are nearly at 0 velocity – just use you brakes for the last 1-2v. To perform that maneuver sucessful, you’ll need the flight direction display at the top of your HUD circle. While you turn you ship (best without giving thrust), the arrow turns with you. It always points to the direction in which your ship flys/drifts in relation to where your ship points. If the arrow points towards you (yellow), give thrust and you’ve done the 180 degree breaking. Pretty easy.

3. If the main dish still lives...
you gotta toast it :p I’m talking about the Conflux, the pink seefood from space. Sadly in JumpGate, they’re still raw while flying towards you. In this form they have the unpleasant charakteristik to shoot at pilots.

For a rookie, the two most important kinds of conflux are Squids and Snails. Squids have the designation c1-c3 (with small differences), Snails are c4-c5. A Squid has a small laser, it’s maximum velocity is 300, can’t take much damage and doesn’t deal much damage – but it always hits (until you hit it yourself).

A Snail shoots with 2 slow ammo weapons, can take a lot more then a Squid and flies about 350 – but it hits almost never unless you fly straight towards it. Once you’re near and you can shoot it, it’s no problem whatsoever for any ship that has a weapon (strangling doesn’t work). When moving towards a Snail, always fly towards it in a curve to avoid getting shot to pieces. Be careful, Snails dish out huge amounts of damage if they hit you and can destroy a beginner ship pretty fast. But that will happen only if you fly straight towards it.

You can train against both of these conflux species in Simulator 5. If you manage only single Snails and Squids in a beginners ship with custom equipment, don’t worry – that’s normal. With time, you’ll get better equipment and learn more about fighting the conflux and this will become easier.

4. Gaining Levels, making money
All right, that was the basic training in the first three chapters, no we go for the real thing. There are 7 mission types that are interesting for you at the beginning:

Mining missions – here the station needs a certain amount of ore. To complete such a mission, you’ll need a mining-laser (Broker, Banker, Excavator, Duster,Cracker, etc.). Good for learning maneuvering with your ship, but on the long run even more boring then transport missions.

To mine an asteroid, fly very near to it very carefully, then shoot it with the mininglaser. If you see sparkles, just wait. If not, you’re not near enough. To see what you’ve got in your cargo, type /cargo in the chat window.

Later when you’ve got a ship with more cargo space, it’s a good way to make cash without a starting budget. You can accept mining missions after you’ve mined the ore from the roids. The mission is accomplished if you’ve sold the ore to the station.

Transport missions – For these missions you need to transport a few personal playthings, pr0n-Videos or other dirty stuff you shouldn’t take a closer look at from one station to another. Since „normal“ humans can’t jump through gates, this is the only way for the little sick Solrain boy to get the newest SM-Videos from Octavia without frying his brain because of jumping (though this would hardly be a big loss). Greetings from the TRI-P0rn0 syndicate.

*ehem * seriously, these missions are the best way to get you pol-Status up for a faction. This is important for taxes and certain items. These missions are also good if you want to learn more about your ship while getting experience points. These missions are payed pretty well (compared to patrol missions).

Patrol missions – to complete these missions you’ve got to fly through several beacons (every non-station sector has one). The sectors where you have to fly through beacons are marked on you map (press M during flight). If you’ve flown through every beacon, you need to return to the station where you took the mission.
These mission give you good experience (compared to transport or mining missions).

Combat missions – Basically the simplest mission. For a certain number of conflux kills you’ll get a bonus to credits and experience. Pretty good if your ship is good equipped and you want to hunt flux to gain levels.

Scout missions – For scout missions you’ll need either a scanner or a camera (you can get both at a station at an early level). If you take a mission to scan an anomaly, you’ll have to fly through the anomaly and press your „scan“ button until you’ve done the necessary amount of scans. Don’t fly to slow, as the anomaly is damaging you shields while you’re flying through.

For a photo mission, you need to fly to a station and take pictures of it, then fly to a different station. Just target the station, move and press the photo button until you’ve got the number of pictures you need.

Faction and TRI missions
These two missions types are given out by the faction or TRI and actually affect the gameworld. Sometimes these missions are pretty easy and give huge amounts of experience and credits to give new players an easy start. Use these.

5. What do I do now?
Like every game, JumpGate is best when you understand it to a certain degree. So you should look at what’s happening, ask how this or that works. Then choose your role – be a trader, miner, flux hunter, artifact searcher (not described here) or one of many PvP roles. In JumpGate you are free to do what you want – although you’ll have to accept the consequences no matter if you’re flying in regulated or unregulated space.

6. Newbie protection?
As long as you’re under level 3 and are in regulated space, another player can’t hurt you, except you shoot at other players. After that the same rules appy to all.

As long as you haven’t shot at anyone in reg space (for which you’ll get a bounty until you’ve docked, in this case you’ll see a small sword symbol in the lower left corner), anyone who downs anyone of lower or equal level will be punished severely (permanent bounty and loss of insurance).

In unregulated Space, everyone may shoot you if he feels like it, there is no penalty at all. Most people (including me) don’t kill lowlevel pilots, except in extreme cases (he’s launching missiles, etc). But don’t rely on that, there are idiots who just like to get their kill-statistics up. If they hit.

If you encounter a pirate in unreg and can pay the amount (e.g. 50000 credits), I’d advise you to do so. In most case you’ll get rough instructions on how to do that in the „Pay or Die“ message, but it doesn’t hurt to know in advance what to do:

You target the pirate with your targeting computer and type /give xxx in the chat window, where xxx is the amount of credits. For 50 credits it would be /give 50. You pay the pirate in this way, if you’re in doubt, ask the pirat if he has received the money.

It is important not to panic if you’re being robbed by a pirate. As long as you cut you thrust as the pirat asks and don’t do anything stupid, you’re perfectly safe in a professional robbery. If they shoot at you a bit at the beginning, this is to prevent you from breaking your connection and saving the money.

Still, you gotta be careful – not all pirates really care about piracy, some just want to kill. Signs to recognize a „honest“ robbery are a) the pirate stops shooting as soon as you cut you engines b) he demands a sensible sum according to you level and c) he has a Squadname hinting at piracy. You should be careful with names that include „fragging“ or that simply do not fit the role of a pirate.

Anyway, unreg is a dangerous place if you don’t have any PvP experience, so watch your six.

Greetings,
Boy666 – supposed n00bkill0r :p

P.S. did I forget something?

Ah, yes. The basic rules about „what do I do if I get robbed by a pirate?“ are also relevant for more experienced players. Playing the hero just makes you look pretty dead.